Instruct and Extract: Instruction Tuning for On-Demand Information Extraction

Large language models with instruction-following capabilities open the door to a wider group of users. However, when it comes to information extraction - a classic task in natural language processing - most task-specific systems cannot align well with long-tail ad hoc extraction use cases for non-expert users. To address this, we propose a novel paradigm, termed On-Demand Information Extraction, to fulfill the personalized demands of real-world users. Our task aims to follow the instructions to extract the desired content from the associated text and present it in a structured tabular format. The table headers can either be user-specified or inferred contextually by the model. To facilitate research in this emerging area, we present a benchmark named InstructIE, inclusive of both automatically generated training data, as well as the human-annotated test set. Building on InstructIE, we further develop an On-Demand Information Extractor, ODIE. Comprehensive evaluations on our benchmark reveal that ODIE substantially outperforms the existing open-source models of similar size. Our code and dataset are released on https://github.com/yzjiao/On-Demand-IE.

The Shifted and The Overlooked: A Task-oriented Investigation of User-GPT Interactions

Recent progress in Large Language Models (LLMs) has produced models that exhibit remarkable performance across a variety of NLP tasks. However, it remains unclear whether the existing focus of NLP research accurately captures the genuine requirements of human users. This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the divergence between current NLP research and the needs of real-world NLP applications via a large-scale collection of user-GPT conversations. We analyze a large-scale collection of real user queries to GPT. We compare these queries against existing NLP benchmark tasks and identify a significant gap between the tasks that users frequently request from LLMs and the tasks that are commonly studied in academic research. For example, we find that tasks such as ``design'' and ``planning'' are prevalent in user interactions but are largely neglected or different from traditional NLP benchmarks. We investigate these overlooked tasks, dissect the practical challenges they pose, and provide insights toward a roadmap to make LLMs better aligned with user needs.

RDGSL: Dynamic Graph Representation Learning with Structure Learning

Temporal Graph Networks (TGNs) have shown remarkable performance in learning representation for continuous-time dynamic graphs. However, real-world dynamic graphs typically contain diverse and intricate noise. Noise can significantly degrade the quality of representation generation, impeding the effectiveness of TGNs in downstream tasks. Though structure learning is widely applied to mitigate noise in static graphs, its adaptation to dynamic graph settings poses two significant challenges. i) Noise dynamics. Existing structure learning methods are ill-equipped to address the temporal aspect of noise, hampering their effectiveness in such dynamic and ever-changing noise patterns. ii) More severe noise. Noise may be introduced along with multiple interactions between two nodes, leading to the re-pollution of these nodes and consequently causing more severe noise compared to static graphs. In this paper, we present RDGSL, a representation learning method in continuous-time dynamic graphs. Meanwhile, we propose dynamic graph structure learning, a novel supervisory signal that empowers RDGSL with the ability to effectively combat noise in dynamic graphs. To address the noise dynamics issue, we introduce the Dynamic Graph Filter, where we innovatively propose a dynamic noise function that dynamically captures both current and historical noise, enabling us to assess the temporal aspect of noise and generate a denoised graph. We further propose the Temporal Embedding Learner to tackle the challenge of more severe noise, which utilizes an attention mechanism to selectively turn a blind eye to noisy edges and hence focus on normal edges, enhancing the expressiveness for representation generation that remains resilient to noise. Our method demonstrates robustness towards downstream tasks, resulting in up to 5.1% absolute AUC improvement in evolving classification versus the second-best baseline.

Dual Intents Graph Modeling for User-centric Group Discovery

Online groups have become increasingly prevalent, providing users with space to share experiences and explore interests. Therefore, user-centric group discovery task, i.e., recommending groups to users can help both users' online experiences and platforms' long-term developments. Existing recommender methods can not deal with this task as modeling user-group participation into a bipartite graph overlooks their item-side interests. Although there exist a few works attempting to address this task, they still fall short in fully preserving the social context and ensuring effective interest representation learning. In this paper, we focus on exploring the intents that motivate users to participate in groups, which can be categorized into different types, like the social-intent and the personal interest-intent. The former refers to users joining a group affected by their social links, while the latter relates to users joining groups with like-minded people for self-enjoyment. To comprehend different intents, we propose a novel model, DiRec, that first models each intent separately and then fuses them together for predictions. Specifically, for social-intent, we introduce the hypergraph structure to model the relationship between groups and members, leading to a richer understanding of the social context. As for interest-intent, we employ novel structural refinement on the interactive graph to uncover more intricate user behaviors and group interests, realizing better representation learning of interests. Furthermore, we also observe the intent overlapping in real-world scenarios and devise a novel self-supervised learning loss that encourages such alignment for final recommendations. Extensive experiments on three public datasets show the significant improvement of DiRec over the state-of-the-art methods.

ReactIE: Enhancing Chemical Reaction Extraction with Weak Supervision

Structured chemical reaction information plays a vital role for chemists engaged in laboratory work and advanced endeavors such as computer-aided drug design. Despite the importance of extracting structured reactions from scientific literature, data annotation for this purpose is cost-prohibitive due to the significant labor required from domain experts. Consequently, the scarcity of sufficient training data poses an obstacle to the progress of related models in this domain. In this paper, we propose ReactIE, which combines two weakly supervised approaches for pre-training. Our method utilizes frequent patterns within the text as linguistic cues to identify specific characteristics of chemical reactions. Additionally, we adopt synthetic data from patent records as distant supervision to incorporate domain knowledge into the model. Experiments demonstrate that ReactIE achieves substantial improvements and outperforms all existing baselines.

Explaining and Adapting Graph Conditional Shift

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown remarkable performance on graph-structured data. However, recent empirical studies suggest that GNNs are very susceptible to distribution shift. There is still significant ambiguity about why graph-based models seem more vulnerable to these shifts. In this work we provide a thorough theoretical analysis on it by quantifying the magnitude of conditional shift between the input features and the output label. Our findings show that both graph heterophily and model architecture exacerbate conditional shifts, leading to performance degradation. To address this, we propose an approach that involves estimating and minimizing the conditional shift for unsupervised domain adaptation on graphs. In our controlled synthetic experiments, our algorithm demonstrates robustness towards distribution shift, resulting in up to 10% absolute ROC AUC improvement versus the second-best algorithm. Furthermore, comprehensive experiments on both node classification and graph classification show its robust performance under various distribution shifts.

ConsRec: Learning Consensus Behind Interactions for Group Recommendation

Since group activities have become very common in daily life, there is an urgent demand for generating recommendations for a group of users, referred to as group recommendation task. Existing group recommendation methods usually infer groups' preferences via aggregating diverse members' interests. Actually, groups' ultimate choice involves compromises between members, and finally, an agreement can be reached. However, existing individual information aggregation lacks a holistic group-level consideration, failing to capture the consensus information. Besides, their specific aggregation strategies either suffer from high computational costs or become too coarse-grained to make precise predictions. To solve the aforementioned limitations, in this paper, we focus on exploring consensus behind group behavior data. To comprehensively capture the group consensus, we innovatively design three distinct views which provide mutually complementary information to enable multi-view learning, including member-level aggregation, item-level tastes, and group-level inherent preferences. To integrate and balance the multi-view information, an adaptive fusion component is further proposed. As to member-level aggregation, different from existing linear or attentive strategies, we design a novel hypergraph neural network that allows for efficient hypergraph convolutional operations to generate expressive member-level aggregation. We evaluate our ConsRec on two real-world datasets and experimental results show that our model outperforms state-of-the-art methods. An extensive case study also verifies the effectiveness of consensus modeling.

Open-Vocabulary Argument Role Prediction for Event Extraction

The argument role in event extraction refers to the relation between an event and an argument participating in it. Despite the great progress in event extraction, existing studies still depend on roles pre-defined by domain experts. These studies expose obvious weakness when extending to emerging event types or new domains without available roles. Therefore, more attention and effort needs to be devoted to automatically customizing argument roles. In this paper, we define this essential but under-explored task: open-vocabulary argument role prediction. The goal of this task is to infer a set of argument roles for a given event type. We propose a novel unsupervised framework, RolePred for this task. Specifically, we formulate the role prediction problem as an in-filling task and construct prompts for a pre-trained language model to generate candidate roles. By extracting and analyzing the candidate arguments, the event-specific roles are further merged and selected. To standardize the research of this task, we collect a new event extraction dataset from WikiPpedia including 142 customized argument roles with rich semantics. On this dataset, RolePred outperforms the existing methods by a large margin. Source code and dataset are available on our GitHub repository: https://github.com/yzjiao/RolePred

Towards a Unified Multi-Dimensional Evaluator for Text Generation

Multi-dimensional evaluation is the dominant paradigm for human evaluation in Natural Language Generation (NLG), i.e., evaluating the generated text from multiple explainable dimensions, such as coherence and fluency. However, automatic evaluation in NLG is still dominated by similarity-based metrics, and we lack a reliable framework for a more comprehensive evaluation of advanced models. In this paper, we propose a unified multi-dimensional evaluator UniEval for NLG. We re-frame NLG evaluation as a Boolean Question Answering (QA) task, and by guiding the model with different questions, we can use one evaluator to evaluate from multiple dimensions. Furthermore, thanks to the unified Boolean QA format, we are able to introduce an intermediate learning phase that enables UniEval to incorporate external knowledge from multiple related tasks and gain further improvement. Experiments on three typical NLG tasks show that UniEval correlates substantially better with human judgments than existing metrics. Specifically, compared to the top-performing unified evaluators, UniEval achieves a 23% higher correlation on text summarization, and over 43% on dialogue response generation. Also, UniEval demonstrates a strong zero-shot learning ability for unseen evaluation dimensions and tasks. Source code, data and all pre-trained evaluators are available on our GitHub repository (https://github.com/maszhongming/UniEval).

Triangle Graph Interest Network for Click-through Rate Prediction

Click-through rate prediction is a critical task in online advertising. Currently, many existing methods attempt to extract user potential interests from historical click behavior sequences. However, it is difficult to handle sparse user behaviors or broaden interest exploration. Recently, some researchers incorporate the item-item co-occurrence graph as an auxiliary. Due to the elusiveness of user interests, those works still fail to determine the real motivation of user click behaviors. Besides, those works are more biased towards popular or similar commodities. They lack an effective mechanism to break the diversity restrictions. In this paper, we point out two special properties of triangles in the item-item graphs for recommendation systems: Intra-triangle homophily and Inter-triangle heterophiy. Based on this, we propose a novel and effective framework named Triangle Graph Interest Network (TGIN). For each clicked item in user behavior sequences, we introduce the triangles in its neighborhood of the item-item graphs as a supplement. TGIN regards these triangles as the basic units of user interests, which provide the clues to capture the real motivation for a user clicking an item. We characterize every click behavior by aggregating the information of several interest units to alleviate the elusive motivation problem. The attention mechanism determines users' preference for different interest units. By selecting diverse and relative triangles, TGIN brings in novel and serendipitous items to expand exploration opportunities of user interests. Then, we aggregate the multi-level interests of historical behavior sequences to improve CTR prediction. Extensive experiments on both public and industrial datasets clearly verify the effectiveness of our framework.